Seriously, would we have expended even a tenth of as much energy into building the rocket technology to go to space, without the nationalistic prestige race in the 60s? Or the idea that we could use them to lob nuclear holocaust at each other if shit hit the fan?
Maybe humanity needs to live under a threat of annihilation in order to get its collective shit together? It's a thought that comes to my mind every time I open a news site.
it wasn't the dick waving bits that drove progress. it actually postponed it in many areas... that apollo program was damned expensive relative to the technology that came out of it. a gigantic vanity project.
that whole man on the moon business is really quite dumb (although impressive) compared to the robotic probes we use today, which are what the soviet union was pioneering at the time... all that dick waving stopped them from doing it sooner.
but the problem was that we reversed the order. We should have gone to moon in the late 80s rather than build the shuttle, after having built a ton robotic probes and having much better automation. Imagine where we would be if we'd had a sustained 10-50 Billion /year increase in AI and robotics over the past 50 years. But because we pushed manned systems first, we both became disillusioned at the cost/benefit ratio and made that ratio worse by becoming very concerned about human life risk. And thus we lost momentum - budgetary, career-wise in engineering, public sentiment, political support ... On the other hand - I am a big supporter of the Goldin era "Faster, Better, Cheaper" approach. We got more done even with a 50% failure rate, and at half the cost - just by flat out doing more.
Seriously, would we have expended even a tenth of as much energy into building the rocket technology to go to space, without the nationalistic prestige race in the 60s? Or the idea that we could use them to lob nuclear holocaust at each other if shit hit the fan?